God is really a comedian because you pray to Jesus and a lecherous lawyer is the one who shows up to help. And then you diss the lawyer but wind up breaking the treatment rules anyway because you're so despondent and lonely you sleep with this mad handsome ex-Marine, artist guy named Jake, who's got a cool scar across his cheek and turns out to be totally bonkers. How is he bonkers? He thinks he's Jesus. See what I mean? Comedy.
After treatment I arrived here at Serenity. That was over a year ago now. Seems like yesterday. Seems like forever.
So now I am pretty much an ex-everything. Ex-Christian, ex-stripper, exâdrug addict, exâpretty girl. Or rather I am half a pretty girl. I am mostly not so bad from the waist up, but my hands and my legs are a bird's nest of smooth, pink keloid scars. A bucket of worms is what my legs look like. I keep them covered and try not to think about them, not so much because of vanity as because they remind me of all that's irreparable.
“That monster. This is horrible,” I say. Meaning our president. I like to blame him. Who else is there to blame? Me? I can barely stay off drugs and I am hanging on by a thread at vocational school. I have a dead boyfriend and MDD and CD, for Christ's sake. What do I know about war?
“He's a hero,” says Buck, puffing her chest out toward me like a lezzy Napoleon.
“He's a criminal,” I reply, leaning in the doorway.
Buck, who is actually one of my best friends here, snorts and turns back to the TV.
“Fucking communist hairdresser. Make up your mind. Last week you were practically ready to swipe the NRA sticker straight off my bumper. Don't go and get all peacenik on me again.”
What she means is that last weekend I went and shot the handgun that Jake is in no way legally allowed to have off the back of his cousin's porch in Joshua Tree. Another reason I stay with Jake in spite of the fact that he occasionally doesn't show up for our dates is that when he does show up, he takes me places I've never been.
I had never felt the weight of a gun in my hand before, my face turned to the desert wind, my feet planted like I knew what I was doing. I could have told a whole other story of my life. I could have been someone else right then. I made the mistake of telling Buck the truth about itâit had been thrilling.
The guy on the news has the same suit same hair same studied inflections as alwaysâdog show or wheelchair Olympics or war. It doesn't matter what I want for the world or what I want for my life. I try not to want anything, because I am convinced that, karmically, every prayer I enter in the logbook, every wish I make on a birthday candle, the exact opposite is fated to happen.
So I shrug and leave. I go upstairs to my room and hang my favorite denim jacket on its designated hanger. One thing these close quarters has done is make me tidy. Life gets small. Our closets are tiny, so we each have a neat row of shoes beside the door. We also have neat rows of labeled toiletries on the bathroom shelves and neat rows of labeled food in the kitchen cabinets.
The juxtaposition between my stuff and Violet's stuff is laughable. Violet's half of the closet looks like a vampire estate sale; mine looks like the closeout rack at Ross. I'm tall like a model except I'm not a model. Pant legs are always too short, shirts too tight in the shoulders, so I settle for whatever fits and is cheap.
Black fishing net covers the wall over Violet's bed. Spooky, white-faced marionettes hang from nails over her dresser. All her long necklaces and the latest lace skirt project hang off an antique dressmaker's form in the corner. I wish I could carry off a look like Violet does. She has a whole genre to live in. But I am not that committed to anything, so I am just me and stuck here. Just me in Chuck Taylors and black polyester pants and a white Moda Beauty Academy T-shirt every morning. Just me in jeans and a hoodie every night. A lame protohippie Indian bedspread hanging on the wall over my bed.
Aaron's and my old guitar leans against the side of the dresser, the only thing I kept of ours. His treasure, his trumpet, went with his mom and that was fine because I didn't want it anyway. Our guitar is the only lovely thing I own, and it is truly a lovely thingâa vintage Martin from the fifties, polished and golden with curves like a woman, a present to us from Billy Coyote. If my housemates had any idea of its value, they would've stolen it long ago. But no one would suspect I have anything nice.
I'm trying to teach myself guitar from a book. As of now, I know two songs, “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers,” and I've been playing them over and over again the whole time I've lived here. Sometimes I try to learn some new chords or a new song but I don't get past the frustration. I go back to what my fingers already know.
The steel strings reverberate so loudly in the old house that I almost never strum them at full volume. I sit on the bed cross-legged with the guitar in my lap and sing softly. I barely touch the strings with my right hand while I move my left hand stiffly into crowded configurations of imaginary dots on the neck. In my enduring fantasy, I am someone who can pick up a guitar and make music into the dead air, out of just me, like magic.
Three
I
528 hours down.
72 hours left to go.
I calculate it fresh every morning. I am a master of wasting time and learning nothing while earning credits.
Mornings we spend in theory class and afternoons we work downstairs on the floor. I slurp coffee from my 99¢ Only Store travel mug that leaks down the front of my lab coat if I'm not extremely careful. Violet is my classmate at Moda as well as being my roommate at Serenity, so she pretty much knows my life story so well that it could be her own, and vice versa. Between the two of us, the tragedy damage award is a toss-up. She prefers to wear hers on her fishnet sleeve. I prefer to wear mine in my choice of boyfriend.
So day in and day out for the last almost-year the Mistress of the Dark has been sitting on one side of me. On the other side sits the yang to her yin, the sun to her moon. On the other side of me sits Javierâmy perfect angel, my basket of kittens, my cocoa on a snowy day. Javi is a not terribly young, not terribly thin queen with a Mohawk of constantly changing color and an unflagging optimism that I judge mercilessly but need like air. Javi and Violet are as close as I get to family, but don't tell my mom I said it. Or tell her. She's so gowed on pills she won't remember anyway. On a good day, Javi and Violet can convince me that there's such a thing as second chances because here I am living one. On a bad day I feel like I'm in that book where the guy wakes up and he's a roach or whatever. Like I'm something so ugly and transformed forever and waiting for the bottom of a giant shoe to come along and put me out of my misery. I feel that way mostly in the mornings at Moda.
Mornings are so slow. Afternoons go faster because we park ourselves in the back of the room and just hang out and talk while I pretend every day to roll a perm on the same doll head full of perm rods, unrolling and rolling the same curl each time a teacher walks by, a pile of decoy rods spread out on the station around me. I wouldn't admit it to many people, but I actually find the repetition soothing. So afternoons I can live with, but mornings are interminable. I lay my head down on the worn, checkered tablecloth and count off each five-minute pie slice of the big clock on the wall, calculating how many pies I have left to go. An eternity of pies.
Miss Mary-Jo is late today, so Violet doodles on the inside cover of her textbook: Tim Burtonâesque sad-eyed girls holding blow dryers and dead flowers. Violet looks even more haunted than usual today because yesterday saw the end of a six-month saga involving some drummer who told her he was clean but turned out to be yet another junkie. This particular junkie's biggest interest in life was being a member of some dumb white gang that wore matching jacketsâhe was that kind of loser. Tears teeter along the lower rims of Violet's round green eyes. Her prettiest thing is those eyes. One fat teardrop falls onto the book and smears her drawing as she tells me about last night, when she found Jimmy slumped on the toilet with his works scattered on the tile around him. They fought, of course. Or rather, she fought while he nodded.
All around us the other women chatter to each other in Armenian. Moda Beauty Academy is housed in a stucco strip mall in Glendale, and there are only seven native English speakers in our class of fifty. The native English speakers are the three of us in my little clique, two horrid blondes from the Valley who transferred from another school that kicked them out, a big gal with terrible skin who Violet calls Shrek behind her back, and a scary stalker named Candy who also lives at Serenity. Candy has borderline personality disorder and keeps inviting me on dates to the Olive Garden. The reason that there's an overlap between Moda and Serenity is that Moda gets money from the State of California for being a participant in the vocational rehabilitation program, aimed at giving addicts some kind of marketable skill.
All the rest of the students here are Armenian and they mostly hang out with their own, with the exception of a goodwill ambassador named Vera and her sister-in-law Lila. Vera speaks perfect English and talks to me once in a while.
She could be my evil twin. She's as tall as me, but wears highheeled boots every day, which bring her to around six foot three. She has ink black hair set in big sweepy waves with hot rollers, as if she's going to an eighties nightclub every day of her life. I'm in awe of Vera, always looking so slutty and polished. She's a big fan of the liner: eyeliner, lip liner. Her face looks like one of those coloring books where a little kid made a bold outline around the edges first and then colored the rest in lighter. Even her uniform looks sexy, subjected to the scissor and the sewing machine and remodeled with a push-up bra and hip-hugger pants. A silver Playboy Bunny pendant dangles from the ring in her exposed navel. Next to her, I'm nothing.
The Armenian women have a potluck lunch every day. Each one of them brings a heavy-looking dish in a Tupperware container. They dole the food out onto paper plates and turn the lunchroom into a homey, chaotic picnic. They brew sludgy Armenian (don't call it Turkish, I learned) coffee and drink it out of ornate, gold-leafed china that they store on top of the fridge. Lila brings me a cup once in a while and I feel privileged. When she does this, Vera will ask me questions and then translate for her friends. Like yesterday, when she asked, “Where is your family?”
“My mother's in Toledo. Ohio. My father died when I was a kid,” I answered, sipping the bittersweet liquid out of the delicate cup, flattered by their curiosity.
She turned to the smiling audience of heavily made-up faces and said a few words in Armenian. The women looked concerned.
“So far from family?” Vera asked.
“Not far enough.”
But they didn't get the joke. They kept smiling at me with sympathy while talking to each other in Armenian.
“They are talking about you,” said Lila. “They are saying that you are nice. They are sad about this. Your family. That you are so far.”
Far. And this out of immigrants from Armenia.
I feel kind of special when they talk to me, but in the end I get tired of trying so hard. I usually wind up at a table in the corner eating pale sandwiches with the rest of the outcasts.
“Do you think I could get Jimmy to a meeting?” Violet asks.
“I don't know, honey.”
She knows the answer. She looks at me, disappointed, then looks away at nothing.
I don't know anything. I definitely don't know how to help her scumbag boyfriend. I just know how to put one foot in front of the other along the balance beam. All day long every day.
“It's really over this time. I told him that this is the last time I'm going to listen to his lies,” she says for the sixhundredth time.
I consider telling her that Jimmy isn't going to quit and that he's going to die and, maybe worse, stay alive and drag it out and drag her through it until she is as broken and deluded as he is and that's how it goes. But I don't because she already knows. Me and Violet both know that he isn't going to quit. That quitting is pretty much impossible. The two of us are here riding on some kind of miracle or some kind of fluke. I have no explanation as to how after everything I'm sitting here in Moda Beauty Academy awaiting a lecture on the dangers of nail fungus, complete with a delightful array of full-color photographs. My reprieve probably won't last long. But I take notes during lectures, and I roll my perms on my doll head, because what if it does last? I have to have a plan for that, too.
“I told him about San Francisco, Bebes,” says Violet. “I told him that we're out of here just as soon as that clock reads five P.M. on our last day. So I was planning to leave him anyway. Dumb loser. We are going, right?”
“Of course we're going.”
“You promise?”
San Francisco is our plan, home of the Church of St. John Coltrane. My dad always talked about how he wanted to go and walk the streets of North Beach, but he drank himself to death without ever making it farther than Indiana. Aaron was going to take me, but he never got the chance. So there's no one left but me and I haven't given up on San Francisco yet.
“I promise. We're going north as soon as we get out of this dump.”
Miss Mary-Jo bounds into the room in a complete panic because she's late. She's the only teacher here who cares about the students, liberally doling out hugs and encouragement. The rest of our teachers use their thimbleful of power in the world as an experiment to see how much misery they can inflict in the course of an eight-hour day. But Miss Mary-Jo we all love. She's the absentminded beauty professor, constantly doing things like dropping her textbook. Then when she leans down to pick it up, her glasses fall off her face. She'll do that, like, fifteen times an hour.